Take More Pictures

I was at my parentâ€™s house the other day and I looked at lots of old photographs that they had on the walls and in picture frames around the house.Â I saw pictures from my childhood, family vacations, and some of my kids of course.Â And I was struck by something:Â there weren’t that many of them.Â At least, not compared to the massive collection of pictures that I have of my kids.

Taking pictures â€˜back in the dayâ€™ was not a small undertaking.Â Taking good pictures was difficult enough, but after you took what you thought were good pictures you had to take the film to the drugstore to send it off for developing.Â A week or so later you got them back to see just how good or bad you were.Â More often than not, you had to trash half of them or more, because taking good pictures just wasn’t that easy.

When my kids came along, it was different.Â We had these new digital cameras which enabled us to take massive amounts of pictures and see them instantly.Â So we took a ton of pictures.Â And because it was so easy to get rid of the bad shots and keep the good ones, I honestly canâ€™t even remember the last time I developed a roll of film.Â As many of you probably also thought, I thought that I would be printing all my digital pictures, but as it turns out I didn’t do a whole lot of that either.Â I started out putting them on my website I created for my family to be able to see them, and then eventually started uploading them to other places online like Flickr and Facebook and now Google.

I said all that to say thisâ€¦ you need to take more pictures.Â I donâ€™t know about you, but there is so much that I have forgotten about my childhood than I will ever realize because we didn’t take pictures.Â It took too much time and cost too much money.Â Nowadays we literally take pictures of everything we do, just about every day.Â My smartphone camera makes it real easy because itâ€™s always with me and I have more places to share them online than ever before. Â But the neat thing is that I still look back over the recent past at pictures that I know I took, but I didn’t remember taking.Â Itâ€™s almost like looking at brand new pictures all over again.

I wish I had more pictures from all those places we went and things we did when I was a kid.Â Digital pictures that I have taken still stir memories of good times and great adventures.Â So I hope you do like I do now and make sure you grab that camera before you head out the door.Â Youâ€™ll be glad you did.

My mother tells me this all the time, but I disagree. I see so much documenting of the moments, that you’re not really *in* the moments. Kinda like going to a concert these days and seeing nothing but a sea of smartphone screens in front of ya'; I find it depressing.

Am I going to forget a lot of it? Probably. But at least I was actually there…

Typical Dad

I beleive that it is possible to do both. Be in the moment and take lots of pics. You just have to pick your moments. I still forget lots of moments, but it is wonderful to have little reminders around of some truly wonderful experiences. Also, the pics are great for family members that live too far away to experience all of the joys of young children.
You do have a point though. You should not get so caught up in taking pictures of your child at play that you forget to actually play with the child

steveholtconsulting

I actually agree and disagree with you. I am more likely to forget to take the picture than to forgot to enjoy the moment. But documenting what my family does is akin to me writing a book about my family I think. That is what I was trying to say in the article. We still love to go back through my Google+ photo albums to look at them. And I always like to buy the t-shirt of the places we go. Wearing the t-shirts reminds me of the great times we had on that trip!